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Growth Hack Fail … For The Win?

A few weeks ago, we decided to go with a free business model for ShareGrab. Last week, we blasted a few of our email lists and now this week we seem to be sitting on more “normal” traffic. I wanted to take this time to update you on the results so far.

Comparing the Monday-Wednesday before the decision and Monday-Wednesday of this week, we’re experiencing nice total growth (up 3x). Direct traffic is up 3x, Social traffic is up 8x, and Bounce Rate is down (15%). What surprised me the most is Search traffic being up 6x.

Going free was the first part of the “Growth Hack”. The second part was implementing a widget that enabled users to share their Top 8 to the public. The second part, the widget, has been met with little use. So far we’ve had a whopping 1 person publish their Top 8. Hardly a growth hack, as it stands today.

My next phase is understanding why this button is not being used? Is it not understood? Is there no demand? What is the job-to-be-done for the button? Things must be reframed and analyzed.

We’ve had a handful of inbound Tweets excited about the news of a free ShareGrab, also a few public Tweets telling their followers about the tool. This is most likely the source of the increase in Social traffic. Excitement is there, but we need to increase our viral coefficient to >1.

I’m a big fan of ShareGrab and i’m currently putting together a blog post on how businesses can use it to find and share content that is already proven popular. I was going to mention the Twitter share widget but I still think it needs working on, as your results have proven.

I don’t think it’s being used, possibly because of the following reasons:

1. The automated tweet message is quite bland and doesn’t encourage click through.
2. Because of the above, people may be put off by having to re-type their own tweet.
3. People may not want to tweet all 8 results, instead they may just want to tweet one of the results? Tweeting a link to just one of the stories makes a lot more sense to me as this is what Twitter is primarily used for by businesses – sharing articles, one at a time.

I think if you gave the option to be able to tweet just one of the results then people may be more inclined to share.